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      Blinken Says Gaza Cease-Fire Deal Is ‘Inside the 10-Yard Line’

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      The national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, was more cautious as both spoke ahead of next week’s visit to Washington by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and the national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said on Friday that an agreement to free hostages held in Gaza and establish a cease-fire was close, as administration officials prepared for what they expected to be a tense visit to Washington next week by Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.Mr. Blinken, speaking at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado, said that the talks were “inside the 10-yard line.” Hours later at the same conference, Mr. Sullivan said there was no expectation that an agreement would be reached before Mr. Netanyahu addressed a joint session of Congress on Wednesday, a speech some American officials fear could throw up new obstacles to an agreement with Hamas.Mr. Sullivan said President Biden would “focus his energy” in his meetings with Mr. Netanyahu “to get this deal done in the coming weeks.”“We are mindful that there remain obstacles in the way,” Mr. Sullivan said, “and let’s use next week to try to clear through those obstacles.”The two officials, among Mr. Biden’s closest advisers, said nothing about how Mr. Biden would juggle the crisis engulfing his re-election bid with managing the tense relationship with Mr. Netanyahu.Instead, they focused heavily on the halting, often frustrating process of getting Israel and Hamas to agree to the details of a cease-fire deal resembling the terms that Mr. Biden proposed in May. They are seeking to put pressure on Hamas to agree to a negotiated halt in the violence and to release the Israelis and other prisoners who were taken in the terrorist attack on Oct. 7.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      After CrowdStrike Causes Outage, Are U.S. Networks Safe?

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      With each cascade of digital disaster, new vulnerabilities emerge. The latest chaos wasn’t caused by an adversary, but it provided a road map of American vulnerabilities at a critical moment.In the worst-case scenarios that the Biden administration has quietly simulated over the past year or so, Russian hackers working on behalf of Vladimir V. Putin bring down hospital systems across the United States. In others, China’s military hackers trigger chaos, shutting down water systems and electric grids to distract Americans from an invasion of Taiwan.As it turned out, none of those grim situations caused Friday’s national digital meltdown. It was, by all appearances, purely human error — a few bad keystrokes that demonstrated the fragility of a vast set of interconnected networks in which one mistake can cause a cascade of unintended consequences. Since no one really understands what is connected to what, it is no surprise that such episodes keep happening, each incident just a few degrees different from the last.Among Washington’s cyberwarriors, the first reaction on Friday morning was relief that this wasn’t a nation-state attack. For two years now, the White House, the Pentagon and the nation’s cyberdefenders have been trying to come to terms with “Volt Typhoon,” a particularly elusive form of malware that China has put into American critical infrastructure. It is hard to find, even harder to evict from vital computer networks and designed to sow far greater fear and chaos than the country saw on Friday.Yet as the “blue screen of death” popped up from the operating rooms of Massachusetts General Hospital to the airline management systems that keep planes flying, America got another reminder of the halting progress of “cyber resilience.” It was a particularly bitter discovery then that a flawed update to a trusted tool in that effort — CrowdStrike’s software to find and neutralize cyberattacks — was the cause of the problem, not the savior.Only in recent years has the United States gotten serious about the problem. Government partnerships with private industry were put together to share lessons. The F.B.I. and the National Security Agency, along with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency at the Homeland Security Department, issue bulletins outlining vulnerabilities or blowing the whistle on hackers.President Biden even created a Cyber Safety Review Board that looks at major incidents. It is modeled on the National Transportation Safety Board, which reviews airplane and train accidents, among other disasters, and publishes “lessons learned.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Can’t Help Himself. Will That Help Him Win?

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      The R.N.C. ended with uncertainty about whether Trump can capitalize on the opportunity ahead.The latestPresident Biden is maintaining his public defiance as more Democratic lawmakers call for him to exit the presidential race.A call with Vice President Kamala Harris struggled to reassure major donors that there was little to worry about.More than 25 million people watched former President Trump’s speech at the Republican National Convention.It was all going so well.The delegates in front of former President Trump were euphoric. The fake White House gleamed behind him. Everyone there, from the show runners to Hulk Hogan to Melania Trump, had nailed their role in a glitzy production aimed at returning Trump to the real Oval Office.Well, almost everyone.“I’d better finish strong,” Trump said, nearly 45 minutes into his acceptance speech. “Otherwise, we’ll blow it, and we can’t let that happen.”More than forty-six minutes later, when he finally finished a winding speech that grew heavy with grievance, it was clear that the person most likely to stop him from becoming the 47th president, the person most likely to blow it, was Trump himself. He couldn’t help it.Until then, the four-day spectacle that unfolded in Milwaukee had been a smooth celebration of the rise and astonishingly good luck of a former president who has consolidated the support of his party. But now, with the balloons popped and the T-R-U-M-P lights turned off, Trump has shown Republicans that he might be unable to seize fully the opportunity that has been laid out in front of him.An earthly celebrationAs Trump took the stage in Milwaukee, Democrats were having a full-on meltdown over President Biden and were trading polling showing that he could not win. They will spend much of the weekend with their eyes trained on Rehoboth Beach, Del., looking for white smoke as a president isolated by Covid-19 and the screaming doubts of his party drags out a Shakespearean drama over the future of his ambition.In Milwaukee, by contrast, it seemed as if nothing could go wrong. The week was an ode to a former president that a bullet had missed, and a sacrament for a man who many at the convention believed was protected by God. Earthly factors were working in his favor, too: Television screens had showed battleground polls leaning Trump’s way. And the convention itself was going off without a hitch.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      11 Days in July: Inside the All-Out Push to Save the Biden Campaign

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      President Biden has repeatedly tried to erase the concerns over his age and mental acuity. But nothing has changed the narrative.Nothing President Biden did seemed to work.He delivered an angry, defensive rant on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” He showed foreign policy chops at a news conference. He wrote a long letter to “fellow Democrats” demanding an end to the calls for him to step aside. He confronted lawmakers on a Zoom call that devolved into a tense, heated exchange about his age and mental competency.Eleven days ago, the president and his closest family members and advisers went on the offensive, determined to end what already had been nearly two weeks of hand-wringing over his listless performance at a debate on June 27. The result was a flurry of interviews, rallies, defiant meetings with his closest allies and impromptu campaign stops — all intended to rebut the premise that he was too old and frail to win a second term.But almost every step was undercut by his own fumbles and the steady drumbeat of calls from his friends and allies for him to step aside, even from loyalists like the actor George Clooney. Together, it was evidence that nothing he was doing was having much impact. Mr. Biden was racing from place to place, but nothing was changing.This story of the 11 days that Mr. Biden has spent trying to rescue his hopes for a second four years in the Oval Office is based on interviews with people close to him, including lawmakers, current and former aides, friends and others. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss one of the most difficult periods in Mr. Biden’s political life.At the end of two hectic days in the 110-degree heat of Las Vegas this week, it all seemed to catch up with him. Mr. Biden was coughing during interviews and seemed almost as tired and scattered as he did during the debate on June 27. At a campaign stop at a restaurant, he looked pale. He tested positive for Covid, canceled his final speech and flew back to his beach house in Delaware.By Thursday, Mr. Biden’s flashes of anger had given way to what allies perceived as the beginnings of acceptance that he might lose. People close to him began privately predicting that the end of the campaign was near, and that he might even drop out of the race within days.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Tester of Montana Becomes 2d Democratic Senator to Call on Biden to Step Aside

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      Senator Jon Tester of Montana called on President Biden to drop his campaign for re-election on Thursday night, becoming the second sitting Democratic senator to publicly join the effort to push Mr. Biden out of the race. “I have worked with President Biden when it has made Montana stronger, and I’ve never been afraid to stand up to him when he is wrong,” Mr. Tester, a vulnerable incumbent whose opponent has sought to tie him tightly to Mr. Biden, said in a statement. “And while I appreciate his commitment to public service and our country, I believe President Biden should not seek re-election to another term.”Mr. Tester’s Washington office said he was also endorsing an open process to select the nominee at the Democratic National Convention, rather than throwing his support behind Vice President Kamala Harris.Mr. Tester is locked in a tight re-election race of his own, and he needs all the distance from Mr. Biden he can get in his deep-red state. Even before Mr. Biden’s poor debate performance last month put the spotlight back on his age and mental acuity, Mr. Tester had kept him at arm’s length while working to appear bipartisan and appeal to moderate and Republican voters. Mr. Tester is just the second Democratic senator to call on Mr. Biden to quit, though a group of House Democrats have done so and other senators have been said to be pushing Mr. Biden to the exits behind the scenes.Last month, when Mr. Tester debated Tim Sheehy, a former Navy SEAL and businessman who is his Republican rival for the Senate seat, he criticized the Biden administration’s energy policies and its approach toward immigration. “The bottom line is: He doesn’t listen to me enough,” Mr. Tester said of Mr. Biden. “He needs to.”But Mr. Sheehy has hammered at Mr. Tester, tying him to Mr. Biden and accusing him of being “the deciding vote for Biden’s America-Last agenda.” One of his recent advertisements played a clip of Mr. Tester vouching for Mr. Biden’s mental competency: “He’s absolutely 100 percent with it,” Mr. Tester says. Polls of the Montana Senate contest have shown a close race, with Mr. Sheehy often narrowly ahead.Mr. Sheehy immediately slammed Mr. Tester’s statement on Thursday night, which was reported by a local Montana news outlet moments before the senator released it publicly.“Is Jon Tester finally admitting he lied when he told us Biden is 100% with it?! And does this mean he’s endorsing his former colleague Kamala Harris??” Mr. Sheehy wrote on X. “Two-Faced Tester is desperately trying to distance himself from the train wreck he’s enabled and forced on Montanans.” More

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      Pelosi Tells Biden She Is Pessimistic About His Re-election Chances

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      Representative Nancy Pelosi has told President Biden and House Democratic colleagues in recent days that she is pessimistic about his chances of beating Donald J. Trump as the highest levels of the party leadership intensify pressure on Mr. Biden to reconsider his candidacy.Ms. Pelosi, according to those who have talked with her, conveyed her sentiments in phone calls with the president and with alarmed colleagues who have reached out to her for guidance on what to do. The former speaker is intimately familiar with the minutiae of campaigns from her years following House races district by district, and she has been marshaling her knowledge of the political map, polling data and fund-raising information to press her case with Mr. Biden.One ally said that Ms. Pelosi told Mr. Biden in a recent call that she had seen polling data suggesting that he could not win, and the president pushed back, saying he had polls showing otherwise.Ms. Pelosi challenged him on that.“Put Donilon on the phone,” Ms. Pelosi asked the president, referring to Mike Donilon, the president’s longtime aide, according to people familiar with the exchange, which was reported earlier by CNN. “Show me what polls.”Aides to Ms. Pelosi, a prodigious fund-raiser and a firm believer in the power of money in campaigns, have also sought detailed fund-raising information from the Biden campaign in recent days to help the former speaker assess the status of the campaign, according to two people familiar with the request.“She does not think he can win,” said one Pelosi confidant who asked not to be identified. People interviewed for this article spoke on condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Carlos Espina is a One-Man Telemundo on TikTok

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      On a recent scorcher of a Houston afternoon, Carlos Eduardo Espina was driving to a restaurant that specializes in Nicaraguan and Puerto Rican food when he received a news alert on his iPhone: The former president of Honduras had been sentenced to 45 years in a U.S. prison for drug trafficking.“Oh, I need to make a video, actually, in the car,” Mr. Espina, 25, said apologetically as he pulled his Honda crossover S.U.V. into the restaurant’s parking lot. He skimmed a Honduran newspaper’s Instagram post about the news and then opened TikTok, where he has 9.4 million followers. He turned the camera on himself while his girlfriend, who was sitting behind him, crouched out of the frame, clearly used to this sort of drill.His hazel eyes widened, and he boomed, “Importante noticia de última hora” — Spanish for “important breaking news” — then shared a one-minute recap. The video racked up more than 100,000 views during lunch, which Mr. Espina received for free because the restaurant owner was thrilled to recognize him from TikTok.Mr. Espina created TikTok content on his phone while dining at a Nicaraguan restaurant in Houston.Callaghan O’Hare for The New York TimesMr. Espina watching Mexico play Venezuela in the Copa América at a Venezuelan food truck in College Station, Texas. Mr. Espina, whose videos are mainly in Spanish, has flown under the radar in the national press.Callaghan O’Hare for The New York TimesMr. Espina, a recent law school graduate who lives in College Station, Texas, has become something of a one-man Telemundo for millions of Latinos in the United States and one of the White House’s favored social media personalities. He posts almost constantly, sharing earnest and personal news about immigration and the Latino community, along with videos about food, sports and politics — and often championing the Biden administration’s agenda.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Why MAGA Nation Embraces Donald Trump

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      More from our inbox:Exit Menendez?Joe, Keep Your DignitySpirituality in America Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “The Deep Source of Trump’s Appeal,” by David Brooks (column, July 12):I’ve always believed that the mass of Donald Trump supporters were fundamentally just working-class Americans who, as the country’s wealth increasingly skewed to the 1 percent ever since President Ronald Reagan, found themselves running faster and faster to stay in the same place, and finally (and justifiably) started to fume about it.While Mr. Brooks doesn’t flat out say it, I take away from his article that, rather than viewing their plight as old-fashioned liberals used to — as plain and simple economic class exploitation — the white working class has been conned by demagogues like Mr. Trump into seeing it as existential, zero-sum identity politics.If Mr. Brooks’s suggestion is that religious leaders guide Americans back to some form of enlightened democratic civility, they’re going to have to drop a bit more wealth redistribution into their message to the congregation.Steven DoloffNew YorkTo the Editor:Having been dismissed as “deplorables,” sniffed at as people who “cling to guns or religion,” and generally considered less worthy, it was only a matter of time before the voters who have become MAGA nation would decide to stand up for themselves and say, We matter, too, and as much as you do.For all his many shortcomings, Donald Trump does have a keen eye for a marketing opportunity, and he was happy to swoop in and exploit the concerns of this group.Democrats may prefer to fault President Biden’s frailty, but they have no one but themselves to blame or the burgeoning strength of the adversary they face.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More